Re: Mac Acrobat bugs as function of font encoding

["Melissa O'Neill" <oneill@cs.sfu.ca>]

Louis Vosloo <support@YandY.com> writes of the problems he found examining
my test files. Since making those files, I've made some new ones which
make some of the problems more obvious, they can be found in:

    http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~oneill/personal/acrobug/

Unlike my original tests, these put the glyph name underneath each glyph,
making it easier to see when there are problems.

Today, I also tried the files on another Macintosh, this time one runing
ATM 4.0.2, and got results different both from those I had under ATM
Deluxe 4.0, and from the results Louis obtained.

In my original tests with ATM Deluxe, no error dialogs were issued, the
files were just displayed using an incorrect encoding or glyphs were
omitted entirely.

Under ATM 4.0.2, my most of test PDF files behaved differently. The file
test.pdf (the one saying ``modified shuffle buffers are finally efficient'')
was the only one that behaved the same -- the `fi', `fl' and quote glyphs
vanished (note that test.pdf worked without problem for Louis).  For
the other files, I had similar experiences to Louis, in that an error
dialog popped up saying that reencoding had failed.

Tonight I tried Louis' test files under ATM Deluxe, and found that his
texnansiencoding-sample.ps displayed incorrectly (e.g. a bullet where
the Lslash should be). However, Louis' shuffle.ps actually did display
correctly, which given all the bugs seems like some kind of miracle.

> Clearly the Mac Acrobat Reader is still not ready for prime time.

Too right. That this is version 3.01 of the thing and they still haven't
got it right clearly says something about Adobe's quality control
processes, and the extent to which they care about the quality typesetting
market.

> Still, PDF documents using LY1 encoding generally work unless 
> (i) you use characters not accessible on the Macintosh and 
> (ii) usefonts  installed locally on the Mac.

I don't think it's as simple as this. I think that behaviour varies with
ATM vs. ATM Deluxe, and with Acrobat and ATM version for one thing. As
things stand, you just can't make a PDF file that you can be sure will
work for everyone.

I guess the only good thing is that PDF files generally print fine even
if they don't view properly.

Regards,

    Melissa.